Fellow modernist enthusiast and collector, Larry Weinberg of Weinberg Furniture, recently contacted us about a piece in his collection that he believed to have been one of Ralph Rapson’s designs. He acquired this slatted wooden bench with a metal base from an associate in the Boston area in the mid-1990s. The table was purchased from its original owner, who remembered buying it in the early 1950s from the Rapson-Inc store near Copley Square in Boston. Rapson designed his own advertisements for the store and the slatted table appears in the sketch for a summer advertisement entitled ‘Summer Suggestions’.

[photo credit: Rapson Architects]

Ralph often designed furniture for his store, which he sold alongside the other modernist mass-produced pieces like the Herman Miller bench and the Saarinen Womb Chair. Many of Ralph’s designs were one of a kind, which may be the case with this table Weinberg acquired. Ralph’s son Toby, owner of Rapson Architects, has a similar table that has been in the family since the 1950s. It has the same base with a butcher block top with slats running lengthwise as opposed to the short width-running wide planks on Weinberg’s table. Though Rapson was busy teaching architecture courses at MIT at that time, Rapson-Inc worked as a showroom for his continual exploration into modern furniture forms.

Ralph Rapson was a man who loved a good party. And although he was not here to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his September 13, 1914 birth, his friends, family, colleagues, and admirers found plenty of ways to recognize the...

Perched on the quiet bluffs above Wisconsin's Apple River, the iconic Rapson “Glass Cube” recently played host to a collaborative invasion by the Minneapolis-based band “Greycoats”, videographer Nate Matson, and numerous roadies. The event was part of Nate’s recent project “Spaces”, a series...